The Nazi terror goes on

Thursday 16 March 1933 07.26 EST
First published on Thursday 16 March 1933 07.26 EST

The following letter has been received here from a private correspondent in Berlin, for whose good faith and trustworthiness the recipient of the letter vouches:- These Storm Troops (Hitlers followers) are arresting Communists in their homes or on the streets. They take them into their Nazi barracks in order to torture them, as is being told us by eye-witnesses. In the Nazi barracks they whip the Communists and break their fingers in order to get from them confessions and addresses.

In the Nazi barracks in Hedemannstrasse there lay in one room about 135 Communists who had been tortured until they were half dead. A Communist who was taken from his home on Sunday evening at eleven o'clock was also brought into the barracks at Hedemannstrasse.

There were many others there that had been arrested in other parts of the city. They were all undressed, and when they were naked had to run the gauntlet until they broke down. The comrade mentioned is lying half dead in the hospital.

The Storm Troops broke into the home of the well-known Dr. Ascher and maltreated him and his wife. Dr. Ascher died as the result of his injuries. His wife is seriously ill.

In Spandau, near Berlin, almost all Communists were arrested and taken into the barracks to be tortured. A woman Communist says that she was taken from her bed at night, brought into the barracks, horsewhipped, and thrown into a cellar. When consciousness returned she noticed that she was not alone, and was surrounded by others groaning or dying. Some are allowed to go out after they have been tortured, others never see daylight again.

We have no means of bringing these outrages and horrors to the notice of the public, as our press is forbidden. We beg you to see to it that these facts become known in foreign countries, because they are real facts. We have no possible way of getting help. According to the new police decree no police official is allowed to help us. We are outlaws.

A systematic terror

This information is confirmed from other sources. Hitler and Göring may sincerely disapprove of atrocities committed by Nazis on their own authority, sometimes, it seems, from motives of private vengeance. The horrors mentioned in the letter, however, are part of a systematic Terror organised and directed by the authorities with the object of exterminating the Communists. Again and again before they came into power Hitler declared that the Communists would be exterminated when they were in power.

The massacre that was foretold just before the general election is in fact now going on, but not publicly. All the news received here from Germany suggests that nothing like the Terror now existing in Germany has been known in Europe within living memory.

There are many thousands of persons in prison all over Germany. Refugees are pouring into France, Switzerland, and Poland. All the German Socialist leaders, unless in prison, are fugitives and have either escaped from Germany or are in hiding.

A block of buildings in the south-west of Berlin which is known as the "Artists' Colony," and which is roughly the Berlin equivalent of Bloomsbury, was raided this morning by 350 policemen and Storm Troop "auxiliaries." All the houses were searched, and a large number of their occupiers, mostly writers, painters, and architects of "Left-wing" tendencies, as well as other "drawing-room Bolsheviks," as the Nazi "Angriff" calls them, were packed into lorries and taken off to prison.